Welcome to the March 23, 2022, edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week.

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The New York Fire Department plans to use its two new Spot robots to report on hazardous situations. See 'Spot' Save: Robot Dogs Join New York Fire Department
The New York Times
Chelsia Rose Marcius
March 17, 2022


New York City's Fire Department has purchased two Spot robot dogs from Boston Dynamics for use in hazardous search and rescue missions. Under a human operator's command, Spot can provide vital data during disasters, for example, by going underground after a steam leak to gather information on dangerous debris, or entering collapsed buildings to measure structural integrity or gas levels. The hope is that the robots will not engender controversy like that seen when the New York Police Department acquired the same technology. "Our whole mission is a lifesaving one," said Fire Department Captain Michel Leo. "That's the core thing. These robots will save lives."

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A conceptual illustration of quantum dots in action. Israel Joins Quantum Computing Club
The Jerusalem Post
Yonah Jeremy Bob
March 22, 2022


Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science has constructed a smaller-size quantum computer, one of only 30 in the world. Weizmann's Roee Ozeri said the institute's five quantum bit (qubit) system is a key step toward realizing a 64-qubit system in the next few years. He called the system "a universal quantum computer—it can implement any quantum algorithm on that computer," adding that it will be used "to calculate the behavior of certain solid state systems" for academic research. Ozeri said his team will be able to build a 64-qubit system in just a year or two because two teams are working separately on the smaller and larger computers, and the teams have unique synergy between them that will have multiple payoffs.

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Study Points to Strategies for Closing Participation Gender Gap in Engineering Courses
Princeton School of Engineering and Applied Science
Molly Sharlach
March 22, 2022


A Princeton University study offers approaches for bridging the participation gender gap in engineering classes. The researchers observed 1,387 student comments over 89 class periods in 10 engineering courses; five courses were taught by women and five were taught by men, although just 30 class periods were women-led. Male students outnumbered female students, and women made just 20.3% of classroom comments. The gender gap was practically gone when women were teaching, and comments from female students rose to 47.3% in women-taught classes. "I think the fact that the conversational comments still had the effect of increasing participation by women is a really empowering result, because it means that you can solicit less-intimidating forms of participation," said Princeton's Nikita Dutta.

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'Off-Label' Use of Imaging Databases Could Lead to Bias in AI Algorithms
Berkeley Engineering
Marni Ellery
March 21, 2022


A study by researchers at the universities of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) and Texas at Austin highlights how off-label use of datasets can inject bias into artificial intelligence algorithms. UC Berkeley's Michael Lustig said the researchers traced their failure to replicate the results of a medical imaging study to a preprocessed dataset used to train the algorithm. The team processed raw images using two common data-processing pipelines that impact many open-access magnetic resonance imaging databases—commercial scanner software and data storage with JPEG compression. It trained three image reconstruction algorithms on those datasets, then quantified the accuracy of the reconstructed images versus the extent of data processing. The researchers said although the algorithmically produced images look good, the inability to reproduce them with raw data highlights the risk of applying biased algorithms clinically.

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YouTube Is a Huge Classroom Distraction. Teachers Are Reluctant to Banish It
The Wall Street Journal
Julie Jargon
March 19, 2022


The role of technology in education has been pushed to the forefront as students return to school amid the pandemic. School districts across the country distributed laptops and tablets to students, and teachers relied on YouTube videos as a resource during remote learning. However, with children back in the classroom, parents are expressing concerns that teachers continue to rely on online resources, particularly YouTube, which students often use when they are supposed to be paying attention. The student data-analytics firm Schoolytics reported that YouTube ranks third among popular online resources for K-12 teachers in the U.S., behind only Google Drive and Google Forms. Rather than completely block YouTube, some schools are using monitoring software to turn off the site when not assigned. Others are restricting YouTube viewing to the teacher's computer or limiting which YouTube channels students can watch.

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A three-dimensional view of the geodynamic model 50 million years ago, when the Pacific Plate motion changed from northerly to a more westward direction. Hawaiian-Emperor Undersea Mystery Revealed with Supercomputers
Texas Advanced Computing Center
March 22, 2022


Researchers from the California Institute of Technology (CalTech), Australia's Sydney University, Argonne National Laboratory, and New York University used supercomputers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center to model and reconstruct the dynamics of Pacific tectonic plate motion. Their research could help explain the 60-degree bend in the Hawaiian-Emperor seamount chain, which runs west and then turns abruptly north. Caltech's Michael Gurnis explained, "We actually had a model which could explain the motion of the plume to the south and then stop abruptly, but we didn't have a model that could explain how the plate could change its direction." After factoring subduction zones into the model, the researchers showed how they may have played a role in moving the Pacific plate. Said Gurnis, "The use of supercomputers essentially allows us to discover and uncover the basic phenomena which govern some of the most important processes shaping the Earth."

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Want to Get Hired in Tech? These Programming Languages Will Get You the Most Interviews
ZDNet
Owen Hughes
March 22, 2022


Job-matching platform Hired's 2022 State of Software Engineers report indicates developers are receiving record numbers of interview requests amid the technology job skills shortage. A review of over 366,000 interactions between companies and developers on Hired's jobs marketplace found interview requests for software engineers nearly doubled last year from 2020 levels, with demand strongest for full-stack engineers. Engineers skilled in the Go programming language garnered 1.8 times more interview requests compared to the marketplace average, while Ruby on Rails-proficient developers received 1.78 times more interview requests. Hired's survey of 2,000 developers found Python, JavaScript, Java, TypeScript, and C# to be their favorite programming languages for their ease of use and functionality, while PHP, Swift, Scala, R, and Objective-C were their least-favorites.

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The dynamics of a flickering candle flame. Peek Inside Flickering Candle Flame with 3D-Printed Shapes
Ars Technica
Jennifer Ouellette
March 21, 2022


The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Markus Buehler and Mario Milazzo have produced "music" and three-dimensionally (3D)-printed shapes from a candle flame, using high-resolution imaging and deep machine learning. Buehler applied previous work in mapping protein structures and vibrational properties to musical theory, to fire. The researchers lit a candle flame, played sounds from a speaker, and recorded the flame's responses to the sounds with a high-speed camera. They then trained a neural network to classify the audio signals that generated a given flame shape, and converted these shapes into "synthetic" single-flame building blocks in order to computationally design unique, self-assembling 3D-printed structures.

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Most People are Cool with Implanting Chips in Their Brains, but Only if They Can Turn Them Off
Fortune
Jonathan Vanian
March 17, 2022


In a Pew Research Center survey of 10,260 U.S. adults, 78% of those polled were against surgically implanting a chip in their brains to improve their cognitive abilities. However, 59% of respondents viewed the technology as more acceptable if given the ability to turn the chip on and off. Pew's Alec Tyson said, "This speaks to control. If I can control this technology, then I'm more open to it." In addition, 83% of respondents favored higher standards for testing brain chips in humans, and 87% supported higher standards for testing driverless cars. Respondents indicated that visible markings or features to identify self-driving cars (70%), and dedicated lanes for such vehicles (67%), would make them more accepting of the technology. More than half (57%) of respondents were against the use of facial recognition software by social media platforms to identify people in photos.

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Microsoft Chooses Exotic 'Topological Qubits' as Future of Quantum Computing
Tom's Hardware
Francisco Pires
March 20, 2022


Microsoft researchers have demonstrated topological qubits via simulations within and without the company’s Azure Quantum cloud infrastructure. Their work indicates that topological qubits, which had been only theoretical thus far, may soon become a reality. Microsoft has indicated that topological qubits are the only valid path to sustainable and scalable quantum computing. Its topological qubit design allows for physical separation, reducing the chance of decoherence, with a Majorana zero mode at each end of a U-shaped wire. Microsoft's Chetan Nayak said, "We are now led by designs that are based on simulations, not just someone batting ideas around in a conference room. And now we have the unique growth and fabrication technologies to bring those ideas to life."

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Multiplexing Could Give Neural Networks a Big Boost
IEEE Spectrum
Charles Q. Choi
March 21, 2022


Princeton University researchers developed the DataMUX method to test whether multiplexing could accelerate neutral networks' data processing and enable them to multitask. The researchers used DataMUX, which adds multiplexing and demultiplexing layers to both ends of the network on transformers, multilayer perceptrons, and convolutional neural networks to perform tasks that included image recognition, sentence classification, and named entity recognition. Transformers-based text classification yielded maximum multiplexing of 40 inputs, and an 18-fold processing speed-up with as little as 2% reduced accuracy. "We hope this can have a substantial impact on energy consumption and the environmental footprint of machine learning models, especially for computing services that process a large number of requests at a time," said Princeton's Vishvak Murahari.

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In September 2021, Native American technology students gathered at a conference in Phoenix and were asked to create photo tags for a series of images. How Native Americans Try to Debug AI’s Biases
The New York Times
Alex V. Cipolle
March 22, 2022


The annual conference for the American Indian Science and Engineering Society hosted a workshop where students created metadata to train a photo recognition algorithm to understand an image's cultural significance. The students tagged images of ceremonial sage in a seashell and a 19th-century picture of Native American children outside a boarding school, with words carrying indigenous connotations. The researchers then compared the algorithm's responses to those generated by a major image recognition application. Microsoft engineer Tracy Montieth said the app was unsuccessful because it lacked proper training data, demonstrating that such data dictates the performance of artificial intelligence (AI), and in this case was biased against marginalized cultures. Florida International University's W. Victor H. Yarlott said more accurate data makes AI systems more representative of human intelligence.

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The ECHO unmanned ground vehicle test-drives by an Emperor penguin colony in Antarctica. The March of the Penguins Has a New Star: An Autonomous Robot
Popular Science
Lauren J. Young
March 18, 2022


Researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's Marine Animal Remote Sensing Lab built a ground vehicle that may be operated in autonomous or remote-controlled modes to study hundreds of Emperor penguins in Antarctica. The robot, called ECHO, is part of MARE, an international, multidisciplinary research program that will track the population dynamics of the penguins, and how they cope with climate change over the next 30 years, to learn about the health of the entire Southern Ocean ecosystem. ECHO features LiDAR, a 360-degree camera, and an antenna that communicates with the antennas on each tagged penguin's Passive Integrated Transponder and Radio-Frequency Identification system tag to identify them. Said the lab's Daniel P. Zitterbart, "The amount of data we can gather through ECHO is something we would never be able to achieve with any other method in this place."

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